Many investors might think of sentient robots when tech pundits discuss the booming artificial intelligence (AI) market. However, intelligent robots only represent a tiny silver of a worldwide AI market that is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 35.6% from 2021 to 2026, according to Facts and Factors. A large portion of that market actually revolves around algorithms and software platforms that help companies make data-driven decisions, automate repetitive tasks, streamline their operations, and cut costs. Let's examine three top AI stocks that will benefit from the market's expansion. Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) is the world's top producer of discrete GPUs.

The Air Force on Tuesday said Lt. Gen. Sami Said will lead a review of the investigation into the Kabul Aug. 29 drone strike that was intended for ISIS-K militants but actually killed 10 Afghan civilians, including seven children. "The secretary of the Air Force has directed Lt. Gen. Sam Said, the Department of the Air Force inspector general, to investigate the facts and circumstances relating to the civilian casualty event on Aug. 29, 2021, in Kabul, Afghanistan," the Air Force said in a statement. The announcement comes one day after Pentagon press secretary John Kirby told reporters that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered a senior-level review of the investigation that detailed the day's events. The investigation conducted by the U.S. Central Command found that the military mistakenly identified a white Toyota Corolla, believed to be carrying at least one Islamic State fighter, and instead was carrying a longtime Afghan employee at a U.S. humanitarian organization. The vehicle in question had been tracked for eight hours after initially being spotted in an Islamic State compound in Kabul.

In early 2021, Americans living on the East Coast got a sharp lesson on the growing importance of cybersecurity in the energy industry. A ransomware attack hit the company that operates the Colonial Pipeline--the major infrastructure artery that carries almost half of all liquid fuels from the Gulf Coast to the eastern United States. Knowing that at least some of their computer systems had been compromised, and unable to be certain about the extent of their problems, the company was forced to resort to a brute-force solution: shut down the whole pipeline. Leo Simonovich is vice president and global head of industrial cyber and digital security at Siemens Energy. The interruption of fuel delivery had huge consequences.

New York-based Blackbird.AI has closed a $10 million Series A as it prepares to launched the next version of its disinformation intelligence platform this fall. The Series A is led by Dorilton Ventures, along with new investors including Generation Ventures, Trousdale Ventures, StartFast Ventures and Richard Clarke, former chief counter-terrorism advisor for the National Security Council. Existing investor NetX also participated. Blackbird says it'll be used to scale up to meet demand in new and existing markets, including by expanding its team and spending more on product dev. The 2017-founded startup sells software as a service targeted at brands and enterprises managing risks related to malicious and manipulative information -- touting the notion of defending the "authenticity" of corporate marketing.

Every time an AI article finds its way to social media there's hundreds of people invoking the terrifying specter of "SKYNET." SKYNET is a fictional artificial general intelligence that's responsible for the creation of the killer robots from the Terminator film franchise. It was a scary vision of AI's future until deep learning came along and big tech decided to take off its metaphorical belt and really give us something to cry about. At least the people fighting the robots in The Terminator film franchises get to face a villain they can see and shoot at. And that makes it difficult to explain why, based on what's happening now, the real future might be even scarier than the one from those killer robot movies.

China has twice as many gamers as the U.S. has people--some 700 million of them. That ubiquity, especially among young people, has worried China's central government. So at the start of this month, it banned people under 18 from playing video games for more than three hours a week. They could only play from 8 to 9 p.m. on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights. The government has gone after tutoring companies and big tech players in this "season of crackdowns," in an attempt to bring these sectors more in line with what they perceive as socialist values and to strengthen control over Chinese society and the Chinese economy.

Germany has long been a leader in science and engineering. Now, with artificial intelligence (AI) coming of age, the erstwhile technological pathbreaker in western Europe is experiencing some growing pains. AI is poised to become one of the key technologies of the economic and industrial future. Germany's federal elections are just around the corner and the country's next government will have a laundry list of grievances to address to make the country fit for the AI future. Since 2018, the federal government has had a strategy in place aimed at cultivating the use of artificial intelligence at home, backed up by similar efforts on the EU level.

NASA has selected a landing site for its golf cart-sized VIPER rover, which is set to land on the Moon in 2023 in search of traces of water. The robotic vehicle will land near the western edge of the Nobile Crater, a 45-mile-wide impact crater at the Moon's south pole, the space agency announced. NASA said the terrain in the Nobile region is'most suitable for the VIPER rover to navigate, communicate, and characterise potential water and other resources'. Nobile Crater was formed through a collision with another smaller celestial body, and is almost permanently covered in shadows, allowing ice to exist there. The Moon's south pole is one of the coldest areas in our Solar System and no prior missions to the Moon's surface have explored it.

Artificial intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems. Specific applications of AI include expert systems, natural language processing, speech recognition and machine vision. As the hype around AI has accelerated, vendors have been scrambling to promote how their products and services use AI. Often what they refer to as AI is simply one component of AI, such as machine learning. AI requires a foundation of specialized hardware and software for writing and training machine learning algorithms. No one programming language is synonymous with AI, but a few, including Python, R and Java, are popular.

A Sandia National Laboratories team of materials scientists and computer scientists, with some international collaborators, have spent more than a year creating 12 new alloys -- and modeling hundreds more -- that demonstrate how machine learning can help accelerate the future of hydrogen energy by making it easier to create hydrogen infrastructure for consumers. Vitalie Stavila, Mark Allendorf, Matthew Witman and Sapan Agarwal are part of the Sandia team that published a paper detailing its approach in conjunction with researchers from Ångström Laboratory in Sweden and Nottingham University in the United Kingdom. "There is a rich history in hydrogen storage research and a database of thermodynamic values describing hydrogen interactions with different materials," Witman said. "With that existing database, an assortment of machine-learning and other computational tools, and state-of-the art experimental capabilities, we assembled an international collaboration group to join forces on this effort. We demonstrated that machine learning techniques could indeed model the physics and chemistry of complex phenomena which occur when hydrogen interacts with metals."